-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
A Novel
In the latest novel from "our most significant rising writer of the American West" (Vulture), a woman searches for a way to reclaim the miracle of life in a world seemingly hellbent on doom.
In her homestead deep in the Mojave, Rose has found a way to live "on the other side of the portal," with an intentionality that's brought her hard-won peace and freedom. She's navigating single parenthood, and she's found a community out at Yellow Pine, where a group of spirited misfits have mounted a stand against the "green energy gold rush" Rose is certain will destroy her beloved desert. When she accepts an overture from Miles, an old flame, their passion proves as intense – and unsteady – as ever. But even as their rekindled romance flickers, it fuels a deeper, more consuming drive in Rose: to birth not only another child but a fuller, more intact way of being in the face of rapacious consumerism, industrialization, and misanthropy. Enlisting her on-again-off-again lover, her fellow activists, and her oddball neighbors, she embarks upon an unorthodox scheme to recover from her rugged individualism, embrace love in all its pain and grace, and come home to the divine.
As furious, bawdy, searching, and searingly original as ever, in Yellow Pine Watkins blazes a trail toward a radically reimagined vision of a good life in a ravaged time.
"Lyrical and scathing … Readers will be swept away by this tribute to the power and majesty of nature." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The psychic impact of place—and its loss—goes deep in this blister of a novel." —Kirkus Reviews
"Churning with … ethical, profane, furious, funny, and cosmic reflections … Watkins' keen and righteous novel wrestles with myriad paradoxes, spirituality, and how ecocide does 'deep, grievous injury to the collective soul.'" —Booklist
This information about Yellow Pine was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Lily Glass
Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of the novel Gold Fame Citrus and the short story collection Battleborn, winner of the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other prizes. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, Watkins is a professor at the University of California Irvine and lives in Twenty-nine Palms, California.
Link to Claire Vaye Watkins's Website
Name Pronunciation
Claire Vaye Watkins: Vaye rhymes with way
If you liked Yellow Pine, try these:
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
